As most of you know, we have a problem with radium in our drinking water.

This is a cause for concern, but it is not a time for panic.

In Iowa, the Dept of Natural Resources (DNR) contracts with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enforce its standards. The current standard for radium in drinking water is not to exceed 5 pico curies per liter for testing done over 4 straight quarters of a year.

This is a topic that has been talked about before at public meetings. Earlier this year, I also talked about it on Sheri Melvold's radio show on KMAQ. As of that time, no one called City Hall to ask about what was happening or what we were doing.

The event that changed things was a letter the Iowa DNR required us to send out. It was entitled, "Public Notification Radium in Water Exceeds Limit." The letter contained the DNR's wording. And, while it said that the presence of radium "is not considered to be an immediate health risk," it had other language that made drinking the water seem about as bad as smoking cigarettes.

Personally, I feel that, while the DNR's statements about what radium can do to a person may have been accurate in general, the letter inaccurately portrayed the situation in Maquoketa.

This is what we know:

Two of the four wells that Maquoketa uses have tested over the 5 pico curie standard. The results for these two wells have ranged from 6.8 pCi/liter to 11.7 pCi/liter.

One of the wells that is over the limit is the one near the water tower that is by the Community Center. The other one is just north of the parking lot in 5th Ward Park.

We were not aware of it until just recently, but these wells tested similarly as long ago as 1980. However, we have also been told that, at about that time, the EPA was actually on the road to relaxing the pico curie/liter standard from 5 to 20, but, in the end, did not.

So, what has changed between the 1980s and now? The major difference appears to be the location of where the tests are taken.

One of the methods for addressing a radium problem is to blend the water from wells with higher levels of radium with the water from wells with lower levels of radium. Up until recently, cities were allowed to test their water supplies at a location where the water was known to have blended. In our case, the tests were done at City Hall. The test results for City Hall showed the pico curie level at 1.8 per liter. Compared to the maximum that is allowed, 5, this is quite good.

But, more recently, towns have been required to change the location of their tests to be directly out of their wells. While it is certainly true that there are some houses that are closer to these two wells than is City Hall, it is also true that no one drinks directly out of either of these wells. Most of the water that is consumed in Maquoketa is blended in our water towers and water mains with water from all of our wells.

But still, we have to be concerned. The DNR has given us an analogy to offer to people as an example of radium exposure, in general. They tell us that people stand a statistical chance of 2 in 10,000 that someone will develop cancer if they ingest/drink the equivalent of 2 liters of water per day for 70 years. While I doubt that anyone drinks that much tap water (considering that we also drink milk, pop, and other soft drinks) each day, we should also pause to consider that such statistics are most often offered in factors of "per million" rather than "per ten thousand."

The Council's Utilities Committee is in the process of collecting proposals from engineering firms on ideas to correct this problem so that we can come into compliance with the radium standard. At the same time, we have asked the various engineering firms to consider the correction of other problems with our water system, such as reducing the level of iron in our water.

I would anticipate that a firm will be selected sometime in November. Most of the firms that we have talked to have told us to expect it to take about 3-4 months for a study to be completed. We will keep you informed along the way.